Flash Hates The Future 17th September 2007

Recently I sent over a few Flash 8 source files to a friend at his company. There was one main Flash .fla file and a few external classes stored in separate .as files. When they tried to publish them on their Mac they received a series of errors like this:

**Error** GoodbyeWorld: Line 5: The name of this class, 'GoodbyeWorld', conflicts with the name of another class that was loaded, 'GoodbyeWorld'

They had one for each of the classes, obviously substituting “GoodbyeWorld” above with each classes name. I was using Flash 8 on a Windows XP system, he was using Flash CS3 on Mac OSX, I could publish it just fine as could the other Windows XP systems in his company. My first assumption was that it was the PC/Mac barrier. If you thought the same then you’d be wrong as well ?

The next day I was down in the office anyhow so I had a bit of an experimentation with the systems. Blam! Got the same error on one of the Windows systems within a few minutes of testing. For an unrelated reason I had the directory view set to “Details” so I had the modified time/date right there in my view. I noticed it said 11:34 whilst my local clock was showing 11:29. It turns out that everyone there works on a shared network drive. When files are saved on that disk they have their “modified” attribute set by the system that the drive resides on. Turns out that the clock on that system was slightly ahead by a few minutes. I simply set my local clock to be a few minutes ahead of the file server and the error stopped occuring. As soon as his Mac updated its time the next day using an NTP server the problem went away there as well. This error happened on both Flash 8 and Flash CS3 on both Windows XP and Mac OSX. All are updated with the latest patches. So as the title says; Flash hates the future ?